Sitting on the stoop last night around midnight, a warm night, or it had been, the wind now starting to blow, and a white BMW parked in front of me with two men seated drinking and listening to music, windows down.
I’m somewhere through a second or third cigarette when the man in the driver’s seat looks over at me and says, “How you doin?”
“Going through a breakup,” I say.
The man in the passenger seat gets out of the car and walks around, over to me. “Come here, man, have a drink.”
I come off the stoop and he gives me a plastic cup and pours out some tequila. “Thank you,” I say. Together we drink.
The man in the driver’s seat says, “What you want to hear?”
“My friend, whatever you’re feeling is fine,” I say.
He says, “I think you need some Phil Collins.”
I imagine he says this because I’m white. I say, “No, how about some Marvin Gaye.”
“Marvin Gaye? Ok, I got you.” He puts on Marvin Gaye and gets out of the car and we all have another drink.
I say, “You’ve been through it too, right?”
“Man, we all been through it,” the driver says. “How long?”
“Together a year and a half,” I say. “But I loved her for a lot longer than that.”
“Just happened?”
“It’s been happening,” I say. “Tonight it feels like it just happened.”
Marvin Gaye at that moment singing about blue teardrops, I hear, with the passenger singing along. I light another cigarette and we listen. The passenger stops singing and says, “You gotta keep on, just like the sun. Went down today and it’s night but in a few hours it’s gonna come back up. That how you gotta do. You will. I see it.”
The driver says, “And even now it’s night but you still got the stars. Just gotta look up.”
“And this,” I say, “us together.”
“Exactly,” the driver says. “You understand.”
The passenger says, “Man, you speak another language?”
“Spanish,” I say. “I lived in Argentina.”
“See,” he says, “I knew you spoke another language because you said that about us together.”
“I grew up Mormon,” I say. “Went there to save them and they saved me.”
“You were one of those accomplices or collaborators or whatever they call them,” the driver says.
“Missionaries,” the passenger says.
“That’s it, missionaries,” the driver says. He toasts the passenger with his empty cup and the passenger pours us another round.
“Came back,” I say, “and I didn’t know what I was. But I knew I wasn’t God, which is what I thought I was when I went. Still don’t know what I am but that’s ok, I guess.”
“Man,” the driver says, “you know what you are, you a human being, just like us.”
“No more, no less,” the passenger says.
The driver points at the passenger and says, “This man here, he’s an inspirational speaker.”
“Just what I need tonight,” I say and we all laugh.
The passenger says, “I’ll tell you this, man. And I’m gonna tell you this because I think you can hear it and understand it. You can see for yourself if it applies to your situation, I don’t know. But in a relationship, we’re always tryin to turn the other person into something we know. Because we know how to deal with that. Usually that means we tryin to turn them into our parents. Probably the bad parent because we convinced somewhere inside them is the bad parent, and we gotta know if it’s there. The killer. So we try to bring it out. And if we do, we run because we knew all along we were right, they a killer. And if we don’t, we still run, because we scared. We got this new thing we don’t know how to deal with. So you got to figure out why she ran – she, right?”
“Yeah,” I say.
“So figure out why she ran. Because you turned into a killer or because you didn’t. If you turned into a killer, then you sittin on this stoop tonight is on you. And if you didn’t, then you be awright.”
“I think I turned into a killer,” I say.
“Or you was one all along,” the driver says.
“I started to let myself be mean to her,” I say.
“She was waitin for that,” the passenger says. “So there you go.”
“I need another drink,” I say.
“I got you,” the passenger says, and we all drink.
I say, “I thought I was trying to be something new in her life. Not one of her ex’s. Not her father or her mother. For her father she can do no wrong and for her mother she can do no right.”
“It’s like that with daughters sometimes, man,” the driver says.
“But there has to be another space,” I say. “A new space. I thought that's what I was trying to find.”
“There is,” the passenger says. “Love is like nature, my man, love has both life and death. Sometimes we think it has to be all life. And we give every drop of blood to keep it alive. But there’s death in love, too, and you gotta accept that. You can’t kill yourself tryin to keep it alive, that makes no sense. You just have to let it live and die and live, just let it flow, let it do what it do. We get told” – he points at all of us – “we gotta fix everything but in love there’s nothin to be fixed. You just let it flow through, like you standin in a river, because you are. The universe is a river you just gotta stand in. A river of life and death, a river of love because that’s what love is, life and death. You try to fix it, now you the killer. You tryin to fix somethin that wasn’t broken and never has been. The universe or this girl. The universe gives you what you need if you let it.”
We’re all quiet for a moment. I look at the driver. “Damn,” I say, “you weren’t lying.”
“I told you, man,” the driver says. “Inspirational speaker.”
“I gotta give you a hug, man,” I say, and the passenger and I hold each other.
“You be awright,” the passenger says.
“One more?” I ask.
“Hold up,” the driver says. He taps on his phone.
Phil Collins, “In the Air Tonight,” starts up on the car stereo, Harlem-loud. We stand there for a while and listen.
Soon, tears on my cheeks, I say to the driver, “You were right. That is what I needed.”
“I know,” he says. “I know.”
“We've all been there, right?” I ask.
“What you talkin about, man?” the driver says. “We all there now.”
